


nothing but humans on earth

by wadapan



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Animated (2007), Transformers: Armada
Genre: F/M, One Shot, Stand Alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:28:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26091166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wadapan/pseuds/wadapan
Summary: Four friends make first contact. Everything changes.A short Transformers story – one without any Transformers in it.
Kudos: 5





	nothing but humans on earth

_Step, step, step, step, step-_

Sari mouthed the words as she strode, placing her feet on the chalk marks in the dirt. On the last, she planted her left foot and slowly swung her right forward. She brought her arms up too, and balanced there on the ledge.

“Something like that,” she said, stepping back.

Rad nodded from the rock where he was seated. “Yeah, exactly. It’s all about confidence and momentum, you just have to go for it.” Carlos gave a minute nod of agreement.

“Yeah.” She turned and moved a distance away from the ledge.

“It’s not as far as it looks,” Rad added.

_Step, step, step, step step-_

“Aaaaa.” Sari shook her head. Rad was wrong, the ledge opposite was exactly as far away as it looked. The drop below wasn’t far at all, but it was rock and Sari couldn’t imagine that falling would be much fun.

Alexis glanced over. She was lying on a patch of grass, using one hand to shield her eyes from the sun and the other to scroll though something on her phone. “You’re sort of stopping between each step. It needs to flow.”

“Yeah, I know, I just don’t want to actually jump.” Sari waved an arm over the edge.

“Okay, watch.” Rad stood and walked to where Sari was, gesturing for her to move aside. He took the strides quicker than she had, and leapt. He landed with both feet on the opposite edge, knees bent, and straightened, raising his arms into a y-shape like a gymnast. Carlos pulled a face and mimicked him, and Sari smiled.

“All right, now you!” Rad span on the spot, pointed and moved out of the way.

_Step, step-_

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, nope. Can’t do it.”

“Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaariiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii,” Rad copied her tone. “Such a wuss.”

Carlos spoke for the first time in a few minutes. “Quit it, Rad,” he said with a smile. Rad caught the subtle note of irritation in his voice.

“Alright, sorry...” Rad raised his hands in surrender and started making his way back around. “Do we have any work due in tomorrow?” he asked, mostly in Alexis’ direction. Alexis responded by accidentally dropping her phone onto her face.

“Ow. Uh. I have that report on AI, but that’s practically done. Should be finishing that now, but instead I’m up a mountain goofing off with you guys-”

“Watching _us_ goof off,” Rad interrupted. “You’ve been lying there for like twenty minutes-”

“-Well, I’m looking over sources-”

“So you _are_ doing work,” Carlos pointed out.

Rad nodded emphatically. “-And that doesn’t answer my question anyway.”

Alexis sat up and rolled her eyes. “I’m not even in half your classes. There’s that math worksheet we’ve got due tomorrow, but I think that’s all.”

“I’ll do that tonight,” Rad shrugged, and looked at the sky. The sun had dipped behind the observatory on the hilltop, casting a long shadow. “Maybe we should move out of the shade.”

_Step step step step step leap-_

From the moment her feet left the ground, Sari knew she’d messed it up. Her right foot was lagging too far behind her left. The ball of her left foot managed to make contact like it was supposed to, but the rest of her didn’t follow. She toppled backwards and fell.

“Sari!” Alexis shouted, scrambling to stand.

“Rad, you fucking idiot!” Carlos ran to the ledge and jumped down. Rad followed, barely a step behind.

Sari was lying in the dirt, laughing. “I’m fine. I’m fine. That was so fucking dumb.”

“No kidding, God, Sari, why’d you do that?” Rad asked. Carlos shot him a look.

“I genuinely could have died there,” Sari observed. She was grinning madly. “Fuck, can you imagine?”

“Yeah, I think that’s enough freaking _parkour_ for one day,” Alexis said, shaking her head.

“You sure you’re okay?” Carlos helped Sari up. _“Ay, Dios mío,_ Rad. This is what happens.”

Rad wasn’t listening. He’d wandered a short distance further into a shadowed area of the recess. “How about spelunking?” Rad asked suddenly.

“What?” Alexis said, then followed his gaze. Barely visible in the rock, hidden behind a fern, was a hole. “Seriously?”

“One sec,” Rad said, running out of the recess and around back up to the ledge. He returned with his rucksack, from which he produced a flashlight. He flicked it on and shone it into the hole. “Yeah, it’s a cave, come look.”

Carlos wandered over and took the flashlight. “Huh. Cool,” he commented, peering down.

“Cool,” Sari echoed him.

“I’m not going down there,” Alexis said.

Rad smiled at her. “You don’t have to. Carlos, Sari? You in?”

Carlos looked at Sari. “Sure, let’s.”

“What if there’s an earthquake?” Alexis asked.

“Last one was a couple of months ago, and it was barely a tremble. Slightest movement and we’ll head back out.” Rad pushed the fern aside and manoeuvred his legs through the opening, pushing himself forward with his arms. There was a light thud as he made it through and landed on his feet. “Carlos! Flashlight, gimme!” he called back out.

Carlos passed it down to Rad, then followed. Sari was next down, and after a moment’s deliberation Alexis joined them. She turned on her phone’s flashlight function. “This is going to kill my battery.”

The cave twisted down and around, and the group stuck close together.

“I wonder if anyone’s ever been down here,” Sari wondered aloud.

“Not recently,” Carlos said, brushing a cobweb aside.

“There’ve been plenty of geological surveys of the area. We’re almost certainly not the first,” said Alexis.

“Left or right?” asked Rad as he clambered down a ledge. The tunnel ahead split in two, and he shone his torch down each path in turn. Both looked roughly the same.

“Right,” said Carlos and Sari simultaneously.

“I was swaying towards left. Alexis?”

“Right, I guess,” she said with a slight smile, “Because if I say left it’s a tie and we’ll spend another five minutes trying to decide.”

Rad smiled back at her. “You know it.”

They continued down the right fork. The passage never narrowed to the point where they needed to crawl, though the loose rocks they were travelling on made progress slow. They reached another fork. “Left this time?” Rad asked. There were sounds of indifferent agreement from the others, so Rad took a chalk from his bag and used it to draw an arrow on the wall pointing the way they’d come.

Eventually the passage started to widen again. “How far down even are we?” Sari asked. No-one volunteered an answer.

“If an earthquake hits now, we’re screwed,” Alexis commented.

“You worry too much,” Carlos replied.

The passage opened into a cavern, the floor sloping almost straight down.

“Guys, look,” Rad said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “There’s a light.”

At the other end of the cavern, past the stalactites and the stalagmites and the pool of stagnant water, a green glow emanated from within the darkness.

“Guess we weren’t the first ones down here after all,” Alexis said. “What do you think it is, some kind of instrument?”

“Let’s go find out,” Rad said with a grin. He approached the drop.

“Dude, if we go down there I don’t know if we’ll be able to climb back out,” Carlos warned.

“No, it’s fine, we can help each other up.” With a whoop, he slid down into the cavern. “C’mon!”

Carlos hesitated and glanced at Sari, who was eyeing up the slope. She turned and made eye contact. “What?” she said.

“We doing this?” Carlos asked in return.

In answer, Sari crouched, took a couple of steps, and half-slid, half-rolled to join Rad. The others followed, and together the group made their way towards the light.

* * * *

* * * * * * * * *

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They meet on the hilltop, near where the observatory had once been. It’s impossible for them to meet where it had all begun.

Rad’s already there when Alexis arrives. He’s on his BMX—the same one he used to ride, before he replaced it—attempting to balance on the back wheel. When he sees her, he brings the front wheel down sharply, practically falling off the bike as he dismounts, and waves. Alexis waves back, feeling a knot in her stomach entirely separate from the burning in her lungs. It has been a long walk for her. Alexis never learned to drive, and never will.

“Alexis!” calls Rad, with a big stupid grin on his face. “What’s up?”

“Hey, Rad.” She smiles. “Couldn’t we have met at the bottom of the hill?”

He turns away. “And miss out on this view?”

Below them is a deep valley, a scar in the Earth, the only remaining sign of the titanic alien spaceship that once lay buried there.

By the time the government had finally arrived, it had been too late for them to do anything. They had erected a long line of chain-link fences around the hills, and had spent two years turning the whole place over simply to confirm that not a single trace of the extraterrestrials remained. They’d never officially opened the gates, but after they’d left, people had made their own ways in. The area still saw its fair share of conspiracy theorists.

“How’s uni been?” Rad asks, in a painfully-obvious attempt at starting a conversation. “You’re doing computer science, right?”

Alexis bristles. He said it because he thought it showed that he cared, but she’d been at university for _years_ , they’d already _talked_ about it a bunch of times. He shouldn’t even have needed to ask. Sometimes Alexis wonders whether Rad had always been like this, and she just hadn’t noticed when they’d been kids, or whether it was one of the things that had changed about them.

Alexis doesn’t know when exactly she started to think of herself as an adult. 

“Honestly, it kind of fucking sucks,” she says.

Rad mock-gasps. “Language.”

She smiles. “Shut up, man.” After a moment, she lets out a sigh. “I don’t know, yeah. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Sure,” Rad says, and Alexis thinks she hears a note of relief in his voice, before deciding that she’s being uncharitable.

As the silence stretches out, however, Alexis finds herself thinking about Rad’s question more, so she continues. “They tell us the stuff we’re working on is supposed to be cutting edge, but so much of the course is already out of date, just in terms of what people are using in the real world, y’know?”  
  
Rad nods, as if he understands.

“You know what I’m saying. Even if we were using the absolute _newest_ stuff, it’d still be like- like banging rocks together. I held one of their computers _in my hands_ , and that thing was more powerful than anything humans are going to make in my lifetime.” She looks away from Rad, because she knows that, in a way, the next thing she’s going to say is a slight against him. “I wish we hadn’t helped them round everything up. I wish I’d just… kept something, or stolen something, anything, just so I could’ve taken it to an actual scientist like, hey, please look at this! I don’t know how I didn’t realise it at the time, but I had the power to concretely change the world for the better _in my hands_. And I didn’t.” Realising she’s rambling, she trails off.

“I mean… we tried that, didn’t we?” says Rad, filling the silence. “With Sari’s dad, and you know how that turned out. And that guy’s like, one of the smartest scientists ever, basically, isn’t he?”

“Rad, we tried _once,”_ Alexis replies, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice. “Don’t tell Sari I said this—or well, actually, I suppose she’d agree—but for the smartest scientist in the world, I think Isaac Sumdac was kind of a fucking idiot. And I think we had an ethical responsibility to try more than once.”

Rad just says, “It was too dangerous. We couldn’t trust the government.”

Even when Rad says things that Alexis agrees with, she feels as though she’s on a whole different planet to him. As a kid, Alexis had placed a great deal of trust in authority structures, and in spite of the doubt she now feels she wishes she’d gone to the government right away, because at least they would’ve had the resources to actually _do something._ Now more than ever, Rad seems stuck in the us-versus-them mindset that had defined their lives at the time; he doesn’t understand that the choice they made was not a binary one.

As she thinks about all this, Alexis finds herself coming to the conclusion that she’d already been toying with on the long walk over—namely, that one way or another, this will be the last time she’ll talk to Rad, maybe the last time she’ll talk to any of them. Being around him only reminds her of things she’s trying to forget. Like Rad, she resents having been abandoned, but she thinks that for Rad it’s because he felt like _more_ while they were around. Meanwhile, she’s just felt like _less_ ever since they left.

Before she can begin to communicate any of this, Alexis hears an indistinct shout from below. She turns, and in the distance she sees a girl with bright red hair waving at her. “Sari’s here,” she says to Rad.

“Oh, nice,” Rad replies. He bounces up and down on the spot, waving with both arms. Alexis rolls her eyes.

When she gets to the top of the hill, Sari hugs Alexis immediately. She doesn’t make any move to hug Rad, but Rad isn’t bothered. The first thing out of her mouth is, “I asked my dad to pick me up again from the bus station at ten. Hope that’s okay.”

“Aww, it won’t even be dark then!” complains Rad.

“Sorry,” Sari says. “If I told him we were meeting here, he’d flip.”

“Your dad’s such an asshole,” Rad remarks, and this time when Alexis rolls her eyes he sees her do it.

She commits. “You can’t say that.”

Sari says, “No, he’s right,” but she doesn’t seem to derive pleasure from the fact.

“See? I’m right.” Rad grins.

“Right as always,” says Alexis.

“Anyway, Sari, you ready to do some parkour?”

Sari blanches. “Umm…”

“Jokes,” says Rad, and Sari punches him, and he laughs. “I haven’t even done it in ages.”

“Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I lifted both feet off the ground at once,” Sari laughs.

“That bad, huh?” Rad feigns concern.

They chatter a while more, until eventually Rad spots Carlos approaching.

“Sorry I’m late,” says Carlos. “I swear, I don’t think the taxi driver knew how to get to town.”

“I didn’t know you were getting the taxi,” Sari says. “We could’ve walked up from the bus station together.”

“Oh, sorry,” Carlos replies. Then he adds, “I didn’t realise that was where you were getting dropped off.”

“Where are you staying?” asks Alexis.

“Just at a hostel near the port,” answers Carlos.

“Anyway, now that you’re all here,” says Rad, running over to where his bag is, “we can get this party started.” He takes out a four-pack of cans, one of several in the bag. “Carlos?”

Carlos smiles, and raises a hand, and Rad chucks a can at him.

“Sari? Alexis?”

“Sure,” says Sari.

“No thanks,” replies Alexis. She’s never touched alcohol, mostly for the irrational reason of her thinking it’d be really silly to survive an intergalactic war only to drunkenly stumble in front of mundane traffic.

They find relatively-clean patches of ground to sit on, and without ceremony, Rad says, “Did you guys hear that Billy got arrested for dealing?”

“Holy shit, what?” Carlos laughs in disbelief.

“I know right? Sad really, he was kind of a dick, but I thought he could be alright sometimes.”

Alexis looks over to Sari. “Remember how I went out with him for like a week at the start of middle school, and then two years later when you and me started hanging out he tried to convince everyone that I was gay?” She smiles. “Because clearly, that was the only plausible explanation for why someone wouldn’t want to go out with him.”

“Oh shit,” says Sari, “I just remembered Fred existed. See, _those two_ were inseparable.”

“What can I say about Fred,” Carlos says, nodding sagely. “He was Fred.”

As Rad continues to rattle off names of people they used to know, Alexis realises that she doesn’t hate him so much. When they talk about what things had been like _before_ , it’s like they’re right back then. Back when they spent every free second together as a group. She realises that, for all his carelessness, Rad seems to remember more people from high school than she does, and seems to have spent time keeping tabs on them. It’s not as if she’s grown much more distant from the town than him; unlike Carlos’ family, her mum and dad still live in the area.

She remembers what it had been like, when her old friends had kicked her out of their group, how she’d fallen in with two of the weird kids. How the three of them had, in turn, taken in the homeschooled girl from Carlos’ engineering class.

And then they’d all changed.

Eventually, Alexis makes her excuses, and leaves.

* * *

It’s not long before Rad goes back on his word, and is hopping from rock to rock. After a couple of minutes’ consideration, inspired by the buzz from the drink, Carlos does too, and Sari follows.

Being around Rad again, for the first time in so long, is a strange experience. The guy’s enthusiasm is infectious.

Rad says, “Yo, you guys wanna see something _rad?”_

Carlos groans. “Fuck, dude, if there’s one thing I _don’t_ miss about this,” he says, but Rad is already dive-rolling back and forth, like a character in a video game whose special ability lets them move _marginally_ faster than walking speed.

“I thought you said you hadn’t practised in ages,” says Sari. She looks to Carlos for confirmation.

Being around Sari again is another strange experience.

“I haven’t,” says Rad. “I’m a little rusty.” He does a standing frontflip.

_“Qué chulo,”_ says Carlos, which is something he only says when he’s being facetious.

Despite having been best friends with the guy, despite knowing him better than anyone, it’s still hard to tell whether he’s lying or not. If asked, Rad swears to always be sincere, and yet he remains something of a profoundly unreliable narrator. Carlos has come to think that Rad lives in his own version of the world, where things happened just a little differently.

“Think you can box-jump up onto that?” Rad points up at a short ledge.

After a split-second’s consideration, Carlos says, “I think so. Only one way to know for sure.”

Carlos knows he’s out of shape. The walk up the hill had left him a little winded. He blames the increased workload of his engineering course, and the fact that at some point he stopped being able to draw from the boundless well of energy he had as a kid, but the truth is simply that there’s been nobody around to push him. He can’t remember the last time he learned to do something just for the sake of it.

He squares up in front of the ledge. Then, he raises his arms above his head, swings them down and crouches, before extending his whole body up into the air.

His left foot makes it up, but his right just slips down against the side of the ledge. Still, he’s able to correct, using his right foot to support his weight around the fulcrum of his left, which he uses to crane himself up into a standing position. He turns and grins at Rad. “Almost.”

“Awesome,” says Sari, and Carlos feels a little worse about it.

“You wanna try?” Rad grins, and Carlos clears the area, but Sari shakes her head.

“Nah.” She peers into her empty can. “No way I can stick a landing now. Not that I could do it sober.”

There was a time when Carlos would’ve refuted that, declared that she’s too hard on herself. Now, though, he thinks she’s probably right. 

She crinkles the metal up in her fist, then boots it into the yawning concavity far below them. Left on one leg, she wobbles uncertainly.

After a while, Sari checks her phone and suddenly declares that she’s going to be late for her dad, and the moment that Carlos has been dreading arrives.

“Carlos, you coming? We’re going the same way.”

He looks at Rad, who’s cracking open another can, and tries one last time to come up with any kind of excuse. It seems unfair that he’d even need one; surely, simply expressing that he wants to stay (a euphemism for not wanting to go) should be sufficient. But Carlos had never really learned how to say no to anyone, least of all Sari. And besides, if he stays—just him and Rad—maybe it’ll be the final proof that their friendship isn’t what it once was.

* *

As the last of the evening slips away from her, Sari finds herself increasingly sure that she’s messing everything up.

It had started with Alexis. The two of them had been so close, but ever since Sari dropped out of university they’d barely exchanged a handful of messages. As they’d all been talking, Sari had been able to tell that Alexis was just waiting for an opening to leave, and that had hurt, because Sari blames herself for letting things get so bad.

Then, after Alexis had left, Sari had said nothing about it to the others, and she hates that too, because it feels like just another failure of communication.

Now, Carlos is dead silent.

They pick their way down the hillside. Sari’s foot slides over the sloped dirt, and she puts an arm out for balance, and for some reason catches herself expecting Carlos to steady her. But of course, he doesn’t.

“So, uhh. You looking forward to going back to uni?” she asks him.

“Yeah, I guess,” Carlos replies. “Be nice to see my friends again. My family can be a little much sometimes.”

“What are they like?” asks Sari. “Your new friends.” When Carlos gives her a look, she adds, “Like, you’ve never talked about them.”

“They’re nice,” he says. “It’s weird. They’re all in my course, so they like all the same stuff as me. It’s so different to how it is with you guys. Like, me and Rad are very different people, but I dunno… we’re on the same wavelength?”

“Yeah,” agrees Sari. “So it’s more like with me and you, where we only really hung out because we were in the same class.”

“Is that what you think?” Carlos’ face scrunches up a bit.

“I mean, no,” she backpedals. “But it’s sort of true. If we hadn’t been in the same class…”

“Yeah, I guess, but that’s such a weird way of looking at it.” The ground beneath them is starting to level out a little, making it easier to walk. “I don’t think you _ever_ get to choose the people you meet. Sometimes it’s just coincidence. Or fate.”

Fate. Is that what it all was? Sari wonders whether it would be better if that were the case—because then it’d feel less like she’d done something wrong—or whether it’d be worse, because it would imply everything that had happened to them was just the natural order of events. As though their lives hadn’t been completely and utterly upended in the least natural way possible.

Sari and Carlos talk past each other for a little while, and eventually Sari gets tired of the feeling of wrongness, so she just asks, “We’re cool, right?”

For a few seconds, she’s left with nothing but the beginnings of a headache, before Carlos sighs. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Sari.”

“I just… I thought we were cool, and now I’m starting to worry that maybe we’re not cool, and I’ve been acting real shit this whole time.”

Carlos is silent for a second, looking up at the darkening sky. “It’s not like that,” he says. “I guess… even after all this time, I still don’t really understand why you broke up with me?”

“Oh,” says Sari.

“And it’s like, whenever I’m around you, all I can think about is whatever it was I did wrong. Because I’m sorry, and I’m sorry that I don’t _know_ what I did wrong. So stuff’s weird now, and I just think about how great we were together, even when everything around us sucked. And I don’t understand why the moment it seemed like stuff was going to get better, you ended it. We used to know each other so well, and now we’re still friends, but it’s like you’re a stranger.”

Carlos is expressing something which shouldn’t feel like a secret, and yet it does—something buried for altogether too long, tainting everything in the vicinity.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she says to him.

“Oh,” Carlos says. “...You’re not just saying that?”

“No,” she replies. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“Then… why? I don’t understand it.”

She thinks for a moment, picking her words carefully. “Maybe it’s easier to explain from the other end? When it kicked off. You were the first person who ever really cared about me, you know? I remember telling you that.”

“I remember not really believing it.”

“I didn’t get to meet lots of people,” she shrugs. “So it’s like, there we were, and we almost _died_ so many times, and you were always there for me. And then, after _they_ were gone… suddenly I started feeling like it… wasn’t real.” Any caution in her sentences is gone, they are simply thoughts given form.

“Wasn’t real how?” Carlos says. “It happened, Sari, they were real.”

“No, I know, stupid.” She tries to give him a glare, but it breaks into a smile. “I mean how I felt. About you. It was like I knew how to be scared with you, and I didn’t know how to be happy. Suddenly I couldn’t trust myself, couldn’t commit to the idea of being with someone if I didn’t even know what being with someone was supposed to feel like. And then we were going to different unis, and I got scared that without the world pushing us together there’d be nothing holding us together. All my life, it’s like I’ve never made a choice that felt like my own, that wasn’t just a circumstance being thrown at me. I thought that if I moved away, then I’d be able to make my own decisions.”

She stops to breathe, because they both already know how the story ends. Uni was so different to everything that had come before—it wasn’t _easy_ —and she’d cracked under the pressure. Somehow, it had been more difficult than fighting a secret war, and after she’d retreated home she’d realised that maybe it was because she’d forgotten how to face things without her friends by her side.

She worries that she hasn’t said enough, that she’s communicated her justifications no better than before, but as the silence stretches out no more words come to her.

“Okay,” says Carlos. “I think I get it now. I’m sorry for not getting it sooner. I should’ve tried harder at being your friend.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t explain it, at the time, not properly. I don’t think I knew how. I’ve had time to think.”

“Yeah.” Carlos looks at her. “We’re cool.”

When they eventually arrive at the taxi rank, Sari’s dad is already there, car idling. She waves at him with enthusiasm she doesn’t feel, then turns to Carlos. “I dunno when I’m gonna see you again,” she says. “Hug?”

“Sure,” says Carlos.

As the car pulls away, she watches in the rear-view. Carlos is going over to one of the taxis, but he glances back over his shoulder, so she waves, and hopes that he sees it.

*

Rad stuffs his hands in his pockets and watches his friends disappear from view.

His pockets always feel empty. Once, he’d kept a camcorder there, and he’d recorded everything. It had been living proof of all the things that had happened to them. Now, it’s gone, and he finds himself with nothing to replace it with. Nothing worth recording.

He downs the last of the lager, and ambles over to the site of the observatory. He hops the fence. The walls of the thing are mostly intact, but the curved roof is long gone, so he’s able to scale some of the rubble with well-practised steps and leaps, before dropping down into the main chamber.

The top lens of the telescope is broken, scattered across the floor. The bottom one is missing, presumably scavenged by someone at some point. Nonetheless, Rad picks his way across the shards and peers up the tube. The stars are just coming into view. They’re no closer inside than they were outside.

“I’m s-starting to think Alexis was right,” he slurs. “We shouldn’t have let you go.”

He frowns at the walls. He’s forgotten how he got back out, last time. He wishes the others hadn’t gone so soon; they could’ve worked out the path together.

“I don’t get it. I thought the whole point of being able to change was that you could keep doing it. A bad thing happens to you, and you change. Okay. Now change again. Alexis changed. Carlos changed. Sari changed. Why can’t I?”

He raps his knuckles on the telescope, and gets distracted tapping out a rhythm, the ringing of the metal like a wordless answer to his question. He forgets what the question was.

He burps loudly, and it echoes through the building. “That’s not very rad of you,” he chides himself without thinking.

After looking at the stars a little longer, his thoughts clear somewhat. “Man, what the fuck am I even doing here?” he asks.

Rad looks at the steel surrounding him, and sees the imperfections in it, and works out what he’s going to do.

He takes the first step.

**Author's Note:**

> A complete behind-the-scenes commentary explaining the writing process for _nothing but humans on earth_ can be found as an appendix to [the mirrored version available on my blog](https://wadapan.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/nothing-but-humans-on-earth/2/). If you'd like to find out about my future writing, you can follow me either there or [on twitter](https://twitter.com/TheWadapan). Thank you for reading.


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